by Pamela Grundy

Created on: February 14, 2008

About six years ago, I took a job in a corporate call center because I needed the money. The pace was brutal, the work was thankless, and the callers were angry. For six months all I did was try to get through each day. Then, quite suddenly, something clicked inside me, and I found I could in fact do the work and do it well. That's when I really began to start thinking about what value my work was really adding to humanity. The question became like the small pebble stuck in the bottom of a boot on a long hike. I didn't really have time to sit down, unlace all my foot gear, and shake it out, so I just kept going, and it just kept hurting.

For a long time I tried to just shake the question off. Wasn't I contributing to humanity just by paying my bills and caring for myself? Wasn't the fact that I got up every morning and staggered into my gray cubicle, on time, day after day, happy or sad, tired or energetic, enough? Not everyone can be a Mother Theresa, I told myself. The world needs ditch diggers too. As an adequate corporate ditch digger, wasn't I vital enough to the process of keeping all the cogs turning and the wheels spinning and the profits rising to justify the fact of my own existence?

Maybe not. A turning point came when I saw on the evening news that a Category 5 hurricane was swirling around the Gulf of Mexico, heading right for New Orleans, and no one seemed to making too much noise about it. I became agitated. "That is going to hit New Orleans hard," I told my husband. "Why isn't anyone talking about it? A direct hit on New Orleans will be catastrophic. Why aren't they evacuating the city now?" I was by no means a professional meteorologist, but even I could see that what was developing was extremely serious. The corporation I worked for at the time sold property and casualty insurance, and I knew that if (or when) the hurricane hit, our phone lines would be jammed for months. About thirty hours later, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, destroying one of the oldest, most historic cities in the United States, displacing thousands of poor people and killing hundreds of Americans, most of them black. The President of the United States didn't even bother to visit until days later. The outrage and grief was palpable and lasting.

In the months that followed, I had many occasions to think about how much I did not do in the hours preceding the direct hit. Not that I was under the illusion of delusion that I could have personally done anything to evacuate

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>